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Gov. Nathan Deal’s office released his state budget for fiscal year 2016 late last week, and if you work your way through the numbers in the document you will see a significant turning point in recent state history.

During the 2008 General Assembly session, lawmakers passed what was then Georgia’s largest budget ever, totaling $21.1 billion in state funds.

Later that year, the housing and construction industries collapsed, banks started failing across the country, and a meltdown in the financial markets nearly crashed the economy.

Visitors who come to Atlanta next month to see Gov. Nathan Deal take the oath of office for his second term will find a Capitol complex that looks different from four years ago when Deal was first sworn in.

There has been a reworking of the east side of the Capitol that first opened in 1889, and it provides a more welcoming environment for the general public.

A parking deck across Capitol Avenue that had been crumbling into disrepair for years is gone – demolition crews began tearing down and carting away the aging concrete structure last April.

If you had said a year ago that a Democrat who’d never been a candidate for office before would be running competitively for the Senate seat vacated by Saxby Chambliss, I would have given you the same skeptical response.

Anyone familiar with Georgia’s elections in 2010 and 2012 would have reached a similar conclusion. In those two cycles, Republicans swept every statewide office by comfortable margins, easily retained a U.S. Senate seat, and won roughly two-thirds control of both legislative chambers.

The state’s population is becoming less white as the percentage of black, Latino and Asian residents increases. In theory, the growing diversity means Georgia could become less Republican in its voting patterns and might evolve from a red state to a purple state or even a blue Democratic state.

These demographic trends are a major reason why Democrats are enthusiastic about the candidacies of Michelle Nunn and Jason Carter in this year’s races for governor and the U.S. Senate.

I’m sure they will be smarter than the students who entered college with me back in my freshman days. We hope they will be a more diverse group as well, reflecting the state’s growing black, Latino and Asian populations.

Unfortunately for Georgia’s future, there will be fewer of these students attending our public colleges than there were a couple of years ago.

After growing to a record level of 318,000 students in 2011, the combined enrollment at our public colleges declined to 314,000 in 2012 and to 309,000 in 2013.

Kingston was able to hold off a late surge by Karen Handel in the primary campaign’s closing days to make it into a runoff with businessman David Perdue, the frontrunner.

Kingston then started hauling in endorsements from candidates like Handel and Rep. Phil Gingrey, along with the support of House colleagues Lynn Westmoreland, Tom Price and Rob Woodall. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich also said he was supporting Kingston in the runoff.

When the U.S. Senate race kicked off last year, the conventional wisdom was that Jack Kingston would be hindered by the fact he was not well-known to Georgia’s voters outside the coastal counties he represented in the 1st Congressional District.

Kingston would be running at a disadvantage against former secretary of state Karen Handel, the thinking went, because she was more familiar to voters in the Republican-rich suburban counties of Metro Atlanta.

When you find yourself stuck in a deep hole, the first thing you should do is stop digging.

Georgia’s Democratic Party has been in a deep hole for a while. The party hasn’t been able to win many elections, it hasn’t had much money, and it didn’t have a chairman when Mike Berlon resigned in June.

The members of the party’s state committee convened in Newnan recently to elect a new state chairman and, perhaps, stop digging the hole any deeper.

If you’re a Democrat in Georgia, there are reasons to feel optimistic about the future.

The state’s changing demographic mix normally would bode well for the party, as the percentage of white voters has dropped below 60 percent and the numbers of black and Latino voters who are more likely to vote for a Democrat continue to grow.

There is still a substantial base of Democratic support in this conservative, Republican-leaning state. Barack Obama drew 47 percent of Georgia’s vote in 2008 and nearly 46 percent in 2012.